the distinction between observational and theoretical claims is much harder to make than it looks. We have already seen part of the reason: because of auxiliary hypotheses, no scientific claim in isolation has observational consequences, and so my schematic list of observational consequences of ‘atoms are made up of electrons and protons’ is a fiction. Ultimately, the observational claims of a scientific theory rest on its theoretical claims, and cannot be fully understood without them.
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observational claims & scientific theories
